The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)(32)

Speaker shifted her beak, amused. ‘No. I reached adulthood before the end of my first standard. By my species’ rubric, I’m approaching middle age. We live to be about twenty, twenty-five, or so.’

‘That’s it?’

Roveg intervened. He shared the child’s surprise, but gawking at another’s relatively imminent mortality felt uncouth. ‘Lifespans vary as much as our bodies,’ he said. He looked away from his work to address Tupo directly. ‘And your species lives much longer than the rest of us, so your childhood is equally lengthy – as I’m sure you’re aware. Remind me how long it takes a Laru to leave xyr mother’s pouch and start walking?’

‘Um … like four years.’

‘Stars,’ Speaker said with a laugh.

‘Mmm-hmm,’ Roveg said, returning to his work. ‘And how old are you now?’

‘I’m seventeen,’ Tupo said, still agog. Xe pointed a shaggy paw at Speaker. ‘I’m more than twice as old as you.’ Xe frowned mightily. ‘Wait, if you can have a shuttle licence, why can’t I?’

Speaker laughed again. ‘That’s a good question, actually. Shuttle licences are based on whatever age your species independently determines marks the cognitive maturity needed to fly a ship. Roveg, when did you get yours?’

Roveg tied off a bit of cable and reached for his glue gun. ‘Twelve,’ he said.

‘See?’ Speaker said to Tupo.

Roveg looked to Speaker, more questions on his mind. He understood, conceptually, everything that he’d just explained to Tupo about the relativity of aging, but the ramifications of a twenty-standard lifespan were beginning to dawn on him. ‘I spent twenty standards in school before I was a barely competent adult,’ he said. ‘And here you are, fully educated and well cultured at eight. How?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Speaker said. ‘We don’t have the opportunity to be as broadly educated as the rest of you. In a person’s first year, we carefully scrutinise what skills xe’s got the most aptitude for, and then that’s what xe learns. So, if a kid demonstrates a knack for wiring panels together, xe’ll be an engineer. If xe shows an interest in plants, xe’ll be trained for food gardening, and so on. The time in which we exist is enough to learn one subject really, really well. We’re specialists, not generalists. That’s what our names reflect. We don’t have abstract names like you do. Your identity is what you do for your community. So, for example, my mother is Kreiek – water maker. She manages her ship’s life support systems. Every big ship has a Kreiek; I simply know which one is mine.’

‘So what is your name, then?’ Roveg asked.

‘You know my name.’

‘I mean in your own language.’

‘I don’t have a name in Ihreet,’ Speaker said. ‘My name is Speaker, just as it is in Klip.’

‘Because you speak Klip,’ Roveg said. ‘That’s your speciality.’

‘It’s not the only language I speak, but it’s the one that benefits my community most, yes.’

Several pieces began to click into place. ‘Is that why so many of your species don’t speak Klip? Because there isn’t time to learn? It took me … oh, let’s see … would’ve been about nine years of Klip lessons before I was fluent.’

‘That’s part of it. The other piece is that Klip is a challenging language for most of us. Hanto comes more easily, but that’s because modern Ihreet is largely based on it. It’s essentially a Hanto skeleton with a hodgepodge of whatever remnants of our pre-colonial languages we managed to retain.’

Roveg could hear her skimming past a painful history there – not her own, not something she’d lived, but something burned black into her shell (or her bones, he supposed – the Quelin idiom didn’t work well for vertebrates). He followed her lead, and did not press that subject further. ‘But you can pronounce Klip,’ he said. ‘You do so beautifully.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. Speaker appeared to be done with that line of conversation, and instead turned her attention to his work. ‘I have no idea what you’re doing, but it looks like you’re doing it well.’

He laughed. ‘We’ll see. This isn’t the kind of thing I do every day.’ It had, in fact, been a long time since he’d delved into the guts of a machine like this. He was a designer, not a mechanic, and he usually deployed fixbots when things went awry. But basic mech tech skills had been part of that schooling he’d mentioned, an essential foundation for anyone who wished to play intimately with software. He remembered the common plaza at his university, where he and his peers would race robots and do mild hacker pranks and dazzle onlookers with elaborate pixel animations. It was an old memory, a nothing memory, but one made painful by the simple context of what life had once been. He knotted it up tightly and sealed it away.

‘I love sims,’ Tupo interjected with a blunt absence of segue. Roveg’s profession had been established at the garden gathering the night before, and it sounded as though Tupo had been feverishly waiting since then to discuss the matter further. ‘The last one I played was Scorch Squad 19 and it was really, really good.’

‘I haven’t tried that one,’ Roveg said, and he wouldn’t, because you didn’t need to see anything beyond the previews to know that series was the purest of trash. ‘If that’s your sort of taste, my sims might not be for you. I make vacation sims.’